After using the x-box 360’s New X-Box Experience, I figured I would throw a few thoughts out there on it, and see if anyone else had an opinion.  For the most part, I’m relatively apathetic to the ‘new’ experience, from what I see, there isn’t very much that’s very ‘new’ about it, aside from the shiney new interface, which doesn’t work as well as the blade system did. 

  It seems that the redo of the UI that has brought along it’s own set of bugs, inconsistancies and annoyances.  In the original blade system you went right or left loading individual ‘blades’ that held all the content on one screen where you could see everything at once.  In the NXE, you have levels that you go up and down in and then left and right.  Once you go right, you completely loose whatever items came before it and you have to reload them by going left to see what it was that was there previously.

Another minor annoyance is that previously when playing music it was relatively easy to figure out how to turn on the visualizations.  In the NXE, music is controled primarily through the XBB’s (Xbox button) menu.  Want to turn on some visualizations?  Tough luck!  You’re going to have to go through 10 different screens to find the “my media / my music / now playing” screen and hit the appropriate button.  Why not have this button on the XBB menu?

I’m not using the ‘new’ netflix integration because I use PlayOn, which I would highly suggest to anyone that has a youtube/hulu/netflix account.  I’d imagine that if you didn’t know about PlayOn that the netflix account would be cool, but for those of you out there that don’t have Live Gold, PlayOn is your only real choice.

My final verdict is that the NXE is nice, shiny and new, which is exactly what the blade system was 3 years ago, and has some problems, but nothing major.

Opinions?

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